Two Swedish Eyes on Media and Public Relations
This morning I was alerted by my Twitter friends that the official Spotify account on Twitter had been suspended. This is the first time I have seen that a Verified Account has been suspended. I haven’t found any explanation on Twitter to why this has happened but will follow the developement closely and update as soon as I hear anything.
With more than 65,000 followers on Twitter, Spotify is the Swedish company with most followers.
Seriously Italy, get with the Twitter programme. Once again an Italian newspaper has been fooled by a prankster, pretending to be AC Milan striker Zlatan Ibrahimovic on Twitter. This time it is the Naples based daily Il Mattino that quotes the Twitter account “@therealZlatan11” in an article with the headline “The latest provocation by Ibra. Twitter: Aronica, nobody knows”.
Il Mattino, calls Ibra “cool and cocky”. Not entirely convinced, but suspecting this is the real Ibra, the paper says that he posted the following tweets after the Monday night game between Napoli and AC Milan (about Napoli defender Salvatore Aronica):
But really, it doesn’t take a genius to determine that this is as fake as a Twitter account gets. The English is lousy and way too provocative even for a person with Zlatan’s record of getting in trouble. And a simple Google search would reveal several blog posts pointing out the blinding obvious fact that Zlatan doesn’t have a Twitter account. Previous cases with fake quotes include AP and Sky Italia.
Fact checking, better than guessing?
Two weeks ago, I blogged about how German car maker Porsche was blocking employees’ access to social networks such as Facebook and Xing for fears of industrial espionage. Yesterday, German weekly Wirtschaftswoche reported that more and more German companies are blocking social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
“For the majority of our employees many external social media sites are not accessible at work for security reasons,” a spokesperson for Commerzbank said.
Other companies such as Volkswagen, E.On and HeidelbergCement have banned Facebook and Twitter at work for some or most employees. While security reasons may be the most cited argument to block access to social networks, other reasons include productivity loss and increased strain on internal networks as employees download or stream large video files at work.
Footnote: The official Volkswagen page on Facebook has 484,000 fans.
Once again, a leading news outlet has quoted a fake Twitter account, thinking it belongs to the Swedish football striker Zlatan Ibrahimovic. This time it was the Italian sports paper Gazzetta dello Sport that quoted Ibra, saying he had tweeted about a possible injury but that he calmed fans that he was ok.
Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s agent, Mino Raiola, has categorically denied that his client has an account on Twitter and Milannews.it says that Raiola once again had denied such an account exists.
“Zlatan has no profile on Twitter and, therefore, it may not have been him writing those things,” Raiola supposedly told Sky Sports. (my translation)
The account that had been quoted by Gazzetta dello Sport is @therealZlatan11, a poorly executed prank with clunky English and even some early quotes in Swedish, obviously translated with Google Translate. One tweet has translated the word “calcio” into “kalcium”, which is Swedish for calcium. In another tweet, fake Zlatan says that “the boat will win the Champions League” (“båten kommer att bli mästare i Champions League”).
Previous mistakes in the fake Zlatan category include Sky Italia and AP.
Hat tip to Expressen.
For some celebrities, social media has proven to be very useful communication channels that reach fans directly. They can communicate their point of view without running the risk that traditional media misinterpret or distort the message. When actor Jim Carrey announced that he and Jenny McCarthy would break up, he didn’t issue a press release. Instead, he simpy tweeted:
“Jenny and I have just ended our 5yr relationship. I’m grateful 4 the many blessings we’ve shared and I wish her the very best! S’okay! ?;^>”
With a simple tweet, he could reach millions of readers before traditional media had time to react. But not everything on Twitter is what it seems to be. Carrey has a verified account on Twitter, which certifies that it is actually The Jim Carrey that is tweeting (or someone he has hired to do so). So if a celebrity doesn’t have a verified Twitter account, you should probably think twice before you assume it is the real thing.
I have blogged before about how AP, Al Jazeera and a bunch of other media quoted a fake Zlatan Ibrahimovic account on Twitter. It didn’t take much work to prove it was fake. And yesterday it happened again as media started to cover the Champions League game tonight between AC Milan and Zlatan’s old club Ajax. Italian tv channel Sky Italia quoted @therealZlatan11 in an article that suggests that “Ibra” had tweeted “I cheer for the success of Ajax, but not tomorrow”.
Of course this is not the real Ibrahimovic. He has never been active online and certainly not on Twitter. You would only need to click on the link in the Twitter bio to see that the link is not to an official site, but to a rather poor fansite from the Netherlands.
If traditional media are going to use celebrities in social media as sources for news, they need to put a little more effort in to research to verify that the source is correct. Otherwise they will look pretty foolish.
Footnote: Thanks to http://twitter.com/ItalianMeetup for the scoop about Sky Italia.
Now and then we read stories about businesses that use Twitter in ways that are creative, but not considered to be according to Twitter etiquette. Perhaps you remember when Habitat UK spammed several Twitter hashtags like #iPhone or #Mousavi, a tag associated with the Iran election, with tweets promoting their furniture? It created an uproar among Twitter users and gave the company lots of negative publicity.
Update: After a conversation with @dohop and checking the ID numbers of each tweet, I see that the tweet from @swedense came seconds before the first tweet from @dohop, giving this story a slightly different meaning. In other words, the tweet from @swedense was not directed to @dohop at all, but to several other comments on Twitter. Sorry that I hadn’t discovered that before.
Sweden on Twitter
Today I found another interesting example (hat tip to Johan Hedberg) from a website called Dohop.com, a “flight search engine”. It tried to generate business out of a very sensitive topic, namely the Swedish election. On Sunday last week, Sweden for the first time elected an anti-immigrant party into the Swedish parliament. The Sweden Democrats got 20 seats in the parliament, sending shock waves through the entire Swedish society, and the election results are not even final yet. So obviously this is not a topic that Swedes would take lightly, but it did not stop @dohop from publishing the following tweet.
However, Sweden.se, the official web presence of the Swedish Institute, would not take that kind of tweeting about our beloved country. So it sent out this rather upset tweet.
Which got picked up by @dohop, who apologized.
I don’t know if there is a moral to this story, but if you are trying to be funny on Twitter on someone else’s expense, be prepared that they might be listening and talk back. Way to go, Sweden.se!